4 DAW's, 4 renders, 4 results

[Peter Morgan]

On 4/30/2023 at 11:03 PM, Starship Krupa said:

Definitely a consideration. I chose arp patches that produced the same notes when they are triggered. I may have got that wrong, though. It's all a big experiment.

How about making two passes at each DAW and then compare pass 1 and 2 of each DAW to be sure they are the same as each other.  If they aren't you aren't really comparing the DAWs so much as the takes.

[Starship Krupa]

Okay, I took my files, and using a tool recommended by @John Nelson, HOFA 4U+ Blind Test, I was able to do a blind listening test.

Drawback to the tool: it's a plug-in, so you wind up listening through a DAW's playback engine. At least I used a DAW that didn't automatically copy and convert imported audio files (I know Cakewalk can be set up like that).

Results: I couldn't reliably pick a favorite.

Conclusions, lessons learned:

For the It Is Carved In Stone: All DAW's Sound Alike crew you can add it to the "some guy on a forum tested it" file, I suppose.

For me, who is kinda agnostic on the matter (I believe that it is possible for two different DAW's to sound different), my conclusions are that first, it is really hard to come up with objective ways to test this. You can use sine waves, square waves, impulses, whatever.

But it's also really hard to get two DAW's to sound alike. Which suggests that in practice, given similar projects produced using different DAW's, they will inevitably sound different in ways that have nothing to do with how the programmers chose to implement Fourier's theorems. This way and that, they nudge you in certain directions.

So another conclusion is that if you sit down and compose and mix an ITB electronica project, doing it with FL Studio vs. say, Ableton Live! will produce sonically different results. Same with a band recording. Even the way the meters look and respond will influence decisions you make about setting levels and so forth.

If you're in doubt, it's easy enough to just try it: download the free or trial versions of the software you're considering and mess around with the kind of project you usually do and pay attention to how they sound. If one stands out, there ya go. It's your ears that need to be pleased, even if it's ultimately down to a placebo effect. Hit records and audiophile material have been created in a dozen different DAW's. Some people with very talented ears claim to be able to hear a difference; Ray Charles famously chose Cakewalk SONAR out of all the ones he listened to. Mr. Charles certainly wouldn't have cared what the program looked like.

Another lesson (not so much learned as confirmed) is that when doing a final mixdown and render of any project that includes randomized elements like arpeggiators, glitch FX, even (or maybe especially) reverb, multiple renders will be different. So do what I've been doing since day one: render once to lossless, convert as needed. If you do a render for each format you wish to distribute, they will all differ from each other, even if it's just subtly. But I don't think anyone wants the MA4 to sound different from the FLAC which sounds different from the MP3.

For the conversion task, I like to use MediaHuman Audio Converter. I'm also investigating AuI ConverteR 48x44.

And for heaven's sake, although nobody has ever paid attention to me on this, when you're listening to your rendered files, use a music player that can at least use WASAPI Exclusive, preferably ASIO. Music Bee, AIMP, Foobar, etc. Windows' internal mixer is known to have a negative effect on audio that's sent through it, and it's best to bypass it (as we do in our DAW's).

[azslow3]

10 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

That said, I don't think anyone would be trying to 100% match settings from DAW to DAW anyway...

As you could conclude from my previous post, there are such people... At least I (the author of ReaCWP) and  the author of AATranslator have tried.

Every single tiny parameter and property, including "trivial" (f.e. fader position, timeline position), are not easy to match even with dedicated and analytical effort. In some cases that is at least possible (f.e. fader position), but in most it is not (f.e. an automation of fader, if it has any curves and used interpolations inside DAWs do not match).

And so

22 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

... they'd just be actually mixing, and letting their ears guide them.

that is the only reasonable way to go ?

[OutrageProductions]

In all my years of experience there have been two unassailable assets regarding production of a record. 

And none of it (after the recording phase anyway) has anything to do with the actual gear. All things being relevant and subjective, it doesn't depend on the recording media, or the console, or the room, or the outboard gear, or the DAW, or the plugins, etc.

It all depends, ironically, on the mixing engineer and the mastering engineer, and their ears.

[Glenn Stanton]

if you want a more flexible "listening" app for your 2-track (or multi-track if you're doing that), then an audio editor like SoundForge, Acoustica, etc can be used in lieu of a media player which may (or not) have "stuff" enabled to make things "sound better" (even if you think you disabled it). the advantage is, if you find something which is nagging at you, those apps let you do some surgical tweaks (which you can go back and adjust in your mix later) to see if there are things you might want to change before the mastering step (or even after if you dare ? )

Edited May 8, 2023 by Glenn Stanton